"Ed Sullivan and Black Baby Boomers... Living the Years"

"Ed Sullivan and Black Baby Boomers, Living the Years"

By Glenn Peppers                 11-14-2018 8:47am

I look at some of the reruns of the old Ed Sullivan Show from back in the day on the Decades retro channel. And I like them! A younger person and I got into a conversation about the Ed Sullivan Show, and the entertainers from that era from the late 1950's on into the early 1970's! And I mean this guy acted as if he was there when all this great music and groundbreaking entertainment exploded back in the 1960's! Then he started in on trying to correct me about things from that day and time that I knew were wrong!

Hmmm! Well, if you know me, you know that I couldn't just sit there and take that malarkey for much longer from this clown! I finally had to tell this guy. Don't try and play it of as if you know what it was like to live and come along back in the day, during the 1960's!.... Because, YOU DON'T!

Growing up, I actually liked The Ed Sullivan Show! In the 1960's, it was one of maybe two national TV shows where you could see black folks on Television! So in a way, for the newbies coming along today, watching the reruns clips on an historian level is sort of like cheating! Firstly because they never show you the entire TV show. Just clips! 

We baby boomers paid for those memories that people are watching by actually living and experiencing those years. We were the ones who waited that whole week long to see who was going to be on The Hollywood Palace on Friday nights, and The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights! 

Remember, some of us had the TV Guide in the newspaper and knew ahead of time; and our parents and many of kids had the national TV magazine, TV Guide as well!

Back then, all those things like Soul from Motown, and Stax records, and Rock and Roll from Sun Records were new to all of us, young and old! New music, new brands of comedy and even wild an crazy circus acts on Sullivan made it the thing to watch on a Sunday Night!

The time and era in which folks my age grew up in during the 60's was special. It was filed with turmoil and beauty, and war, and protest, and groundbreaking music, in every genre! It was just what an ailing nation needed just after coming off grieving President Kennedy's Assassination; when out of nowhere came, The Beatles!

Ed Sullivan and The Beatles

Even though I love those Ed Sullivan clips and excerpts on the Decades Channel. There was and is nothing like having lived those years, and watched and waited with bated breath, every week for each new singer to come along! You watched for every new band, and every new performer straight out of the starting gate of the 1960's and 70's, an wondered who'd become a star! And all of it new! Something never seen before!

Sure I'm glad a whole new generation of people are being exposed to this old school brand of variety TV on the Decades Channel; but as far as impact goes. There will never be anything like sitting crosslegged on the living room floor, watching that floor model 25 inch, or 19 inch TV on its TV cart with our parents, waiting to see The Beatles or The Jackson 5, or Barbara Streisand, or The Temptations, The Supremes and Joan Rivers and a very nervous Richard Pryor, and the ever funny, Rodney Dangerfield, and George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and my childhood crush, Shirley Bassie for the very first time, on our Black and White TV sets!

The Jackson 5, Ed Sullivan and Diana Ross

That was a time when ever there was going to be black folks on TV. There'd be a network of mainly older black folks calling one another going, "Ya'll better turn to channel 2! Colored folks on Ed Sullivan!" As television and hollywood was basically devoid of black folk, unless you played a maid, a butler, of a buffoonish clown! No leading man roles for black men! They emasculated black men on television and in the movies to the point of making them nothing short of sexless hamsters on TV! That is until The jackson 5 came along! Girls screamed over these guys, just like they did the Beatles!

So on a Sunday night, if there was going to be black entertainment on Ed Sullivan, no matter what you were doing around that time, everything stopped! Because we were able to watch ourselves on national TV! And it was a prideful thing too! Because we here in Detroit represented Motown with class and talent!

On national TV, we shined! We were dressed to the nines, sounding and looking good, on that Black and White TV set that let us use our imaginations as far as what colors and textures things could be! Our minds were filled with many colors like crayons that washed our brains with a million colors of the mind! 

We assigned red's and blues and silver and gold sparkles to whomever's gown or jackets. the many shades of gray and charcoal fed the artistic romantic part of right brain!

We imagined gold color to the tailored suits of the Four Tops, or wondered what color Peter Noon's hair was, as he and his Herman's Hermits sung "Mrs. Brown you've got a Lovely Daughter!" 

We all tripped on Mick Jagger's antics and Jim Morrison and the Doors! Then around 1965, color TV kicked in. And if you were lucky enough to catch Ed Sullivan in Color. You saw James Brown's red sport coat! Or those colorful silvery sparkly suits the Temptations wore!

Folks like us Baby Boomers, black or white lived those memories... day to day, week by week! And all on basically three television channels! NBC, channel 4. CBS, channel 2, and ABC channel 7! Then came WKBD, channel 50 in 1966, and to be honest about it! We had Windsor Canada's CKLW, channel 9 right along side our three major network affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC!

Of course, if you had a UHF antenna, you could get Public Channel WTVS, channel 56! A television station that was Detroit based, and has been around since 1955! 

But basically, overall. The nation had only three major channels, and on those three channels, we was a lifetime of good and interesting national and local television programming!

But Sunday night's at 8pm was a night for everyone in america, on CBS! It was time for The Ed Sullivan Show! And to me, even up until today, that era adds up to more than just video clips of James Brown singing "Its a Man's World!" Or Bobbie Gentry singing "Ode to Billy Joe," or a two minute clip of Frank Fountain's comedy, and Tom Jones singing "Its not Unusual" or Gladys Knight and the Pips jamming "I Heard it through the Grapevine!"

Ed Sullivan was a reflection of an era of change in America, and was a time bursting at the seams with expression and creativity! That's why Ed Sullivan reruns and clips are fine for younger folks discovering old school entertainment. But don't play it off and try to act like you were there! 

As the old folks say!... "You don't know nothing 'bout that!" So just sit back, watch and learn something!

For us Baby Boomers and old schoolers from all walks of life! Ed Sullivan, and shows like The Hollywood Palace and national dance shows like Shindig, and even Windsor, Canada's, "Swinging Time" dance show (every weekday at 4:30pm in Detroit and Windsor), pre-dating Detroit's WGPR, channel 62's "The Scene by a decade. 

This was our time! Our musical fix! We here in Detroit were blessed in that we saw the Temptations and the Supremes and Smokey Robinson sometimes way before the whole county did most times, because of Windsor's Swinging Time! 

Even Windsor's AM radio station, CKLW had the first real all hits radio format in north america, where they played everything! Rock, Pop, Soul, Country, Folk you name it! Motown was a big staple on AM 800, CKLW!

But on a national scope, The Ed Sullivan Show was a chronicle, and a gateway to other national groundbreaking TV shows like NBC's Laugh-In, and eventually The Flip Wilson Show, Soul Train, and of course one of the most incredible variety TV shows ever, The Carol Burnett Show!

So there it is! Try as one may. You cannot condense time and life's era's down into micro-video clips and then count them as equated life experiences! You can mostly-only just enjoy them! No one can live or relive those times as they were originally! Trust me, growing up in the 1960's, believe me. Day to day, week by week. Month and year by year.... We lived it!

Glenn Peppers